To leverage Sencha Touch, use this tutorial. Although it mentions Sencha Touch 2.3 and Cordova 3, I've got it up and running with Sencha Touch 2.4.1 and Cordova 4.1.2 in the same way, the only additional requirement is the installation of Ruby

sudo apt-get install ruby

The modern Cordova requires the following:

nodejs (I recommend building node from source rather than getting the binary from distro repository or downloaded binary)

npm (comes with node)

ant (if you install via package manager, it will pull Java in for you as well)

Android SDK (on Linux you can't build apps for iOS or WP8, to work around that you could use a machine in VirtualBox)

To install cordova:

sudo npm install -g cordova

To ensure all this are available, set these environment variables (best set in ~/.bash_profile to be run at login):